George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to rise in this grievance debate. There are plenty of grievances that people have. One that many people know that I have is with the vaccine mandates that have been rolled out around the nation, principally by state governments. Unfortunately, we haven't had any action from this place in dismantling those mandates.

Lest people think it is a fringe issue, this is affecting real people—real mums and dads and real workers—out in my community and right around the country. I have met nurses who were unceremoniously sacked after decades of work with Queensland Health. Hospital administration workers have also been sacked. I'm aware that a senior Mackay Queensland Health official in a meeting with other Queensland Health officials and local GP clinics said words to the effect, 'We're glad we're rid of all of those people'—'those people'; those are the words she used. She meant those people who choose—and Australians are entitled to choose—not to get a medical procedure done that they feel isn't right for them. It doesn't matter what we think; that's their right. It's bodily autonomy.

Emergency aircrew workers in Mackay have lost their jobs. People who have served in the defence forces and aged-care workers in Proserpine, Bowen, Mackay and Townsville have all been unceremoniously sacked. I know that there are issues with aged care, but surely to goodness there could have been something done to redeploy these people or appropriately compensate them. Teachers throughout Bowen, Mackay and elsewhere have approached me about having their jobs terminated as well. There are counsellors and psychologists also in Mackay. I've raised this before in this place. A psychologist who saw all of her patients by telehealth from her own house can't work in that field anymore. Apparently COVID is going to sneak down the internet. The NBN is not that good!

Then there are police and administration workers in Mackay. I have had police in other parts of my electorate also contact me about the mandates that have come in in their workplaces. Then there are the doctors and GPs in Mackay, the Whitsundays and elsewhere. I know there was a surgeon who was stood down. There are GPs in Bowen. It's all because of these vaccine mandates.

The Prime Minister said at the start of this whole pandemic, or at least when the vaccines were on their way, that there would not be mandatory vaccines in this country. But it's very strange, given all of these people—

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We've had mandatory vaccines for a whole range of reasons in this country for a long time.

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker, for your input there. Vaccine mandates in this country have been imposed on workers. They weren't part of their original employment contracts, but now they are. They have been abandoned all across the political spectrum, just left to go on the scrapheap of unemployment. That is a disgrace, and we wonder why there were, on the weekend just gone, and why there are going to be, on the weekend to come, thousands of people outside this place demanding that something be done about these mandates. They want their jobs back. They want their lives back. They want this nonsense to end, and end it should. End it could have already.

Foreseeing this coming—foreseeing all of the restrictions that were coming down the line—I put in a request to the powers that be in this place late last year. I said that what we should do is mandate that the data from the Australian Immunisation Register that goes down the pipeline through the myGov app and My Health Record and all the rest of it not be able to be used for the purposes of discrimination. That wasn't done, and it could have been done. I'm very regretful that that wasn't done. Now, we could look at broadening the basis for exemptions that ATAGI can approve, and I think that ATAGI should actually be made to go and develop the criteria to enable conscientious objection to be a valid exemption for these workplace mandates. Why? It is because we know that, when we force someone to act against their will and when we force someone to go against their deeply held conscientious beliefs, there can be psychological, mental and emotional harm caused. That's reason enough to provide that exemption.

There are so many people from all walks of life who have been harmed by this. I met some the other day, and I've got to tell you that most of them, I suspect, were Labor voters—'were' being the operative word. I'm not sure who they'll vote for, because no-one seems to be helping them this time round. There were about 60 port workers who all face losing their jobs by the end of this month simply because of vaccine mandates. They are not being imposed by government in this respect, but, just like what has happened with Qantas and BHP, affecting mine workers in my area, private businesses have decided to get on this bandwagon as well, even though they don't have to.

Now, that has got to be a bridge too far. There is no government imposition, yet they themselves are deciding that they're going to sack workers because of this idea that unvaccinated people are somehow dirty and somehow pose this huge threat to their fellow workers. It's nonsense. It really is nonsense, but people's lives are being uprooted because of it. Their families are being affected by it. People's mortgages are being affected by it. People stand to lose everything because a fundamental principle that has always existed—bodily autotomy—is being completely and utterly eroded before our very eyes. It's not something that I'm just making up. It's not a right that I've suddenly created. It's a right that's enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. It says that no-one should be forced to undergo a medical procedure and that, if they choose not to go through with it, there should be no undue penalty put on them—nothing.

Losing your job is a pretty big penalty. So is restricting people from polite society, as is the case at the moment when you can't go to a pub, club, bar, restaurant or cafe. You can't even go to a hospital unless you're sick. Now, you might think, 'Well, that's not a problem,' except for the fact that I had a woman from Mackay who couldn't go to see her dying father in the local Mackay Base Hospital because he wasn't within 24 hours of death, according to the doctors. She couldn't go to see her dying father in the hospital. What a cruel society we have become because of this COVID-19 pandemic! What a cruel and divided society we have become! We are discarding people because of their own choices, as if they don't mean anything.

We're even seeing other Australians turn on these people, through the fear porn that they're subjected to every night on their television sets and through the rhetoric of some politicians—that these antivaxxers are dirty and should be avoided. They're not antivaxxers. Most of these people have gotten every single vaccine up until this point. They're hesitant about it for their own personal reasons, one of which might be that there's just no long-term safety data. That's a fact; that's not me making it up. There is no long-term safety data, because the vaccines have been developed only in the last year. How could there be long-term safety data?

But there doesn't actually need to be a reason to decide not to go down that route. There really should be no reason that people have to give for having a choice over what medicines or vaccines they take and what they don't take. They shouldn't be penalised for those choices, but they are. And someone in authority is going to have to act pretty soon to end this, or this country is going to be in very big trouble, because when people are pushed to the wall, when people have everything taken from them—their job, their ability to put food on the table, their ability to pay off their home loan—well, I guess you could say that those people could become completely and utterly justified in maintaining the rage— (Time expired)